


on the beach

by thekatriarch



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:47:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23010439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thekatriarch/pseuds/thekatriarch
Summary: She’s holding him up in the lift; he’s against the wall and she’s holding him there. She can’t hold him up forever. Has she always been this beautiful, or is that new? He would like to kiss her, but he can taste blood in his mouth, so he’d better not.
Relationships: Cassian Andor/Jyn Erso
Comments: 7
Kudos: 48





	on the beach

The adrenaline is beginning to fade away, and he’s starting to feel how much pain he’s in. It’s a lot, and it’s going to get worse. That adrenaline got him to the top of the tower and it kept him on his feet long enough to do what needed to be done, and now that he’s done it, he’s falling apart. It hurts. It really hurts.

Twenty-six. He thinks that’s how old he is, more or less. That’s a long life for someone like him. Most of the kids he grew up with never saw the other side of twenty; half of them never saw the other side of ten. Child soldiers lead short lives. Jyn knows about that. She’s holding him up in the lift; he’s against the wall and she’s holding him there. She can’t hold him up forever. Has she always been this beautiful, or is that new? He would like to kiss her, but he can taste blood in his mouth, so he’d better not.

He’s going to die. He knows it. He's going to die, but she doesn’t have to. She’s hurt, but she’s not hurt like he is. She could still get away.

“Jyn,” he says. “You have to go. When we get to the ground. You can still—” he stops, he can’t draw breath. He coughs and the blood taste gets stronger. “You could get to a ship, maybe. If you run.”

“No,” she says. “We’re leaving together or we won’t leave at all.”

He doesn’t want her to die.

“That’s stupid. That’s stupid, Jyn.” That’s all he can say. When did she get so beautiful? “Jyn,” he says again, not sure why he’s saying it, except that he likes the way it feels to say her name. He feels like he wants to tell her something, but he doesn’t know what it is that he wants to say, so he just says her name. “Jyn.”

“Be quiet, Cassian,” she says. “Save your strength.”

Save it for what? He’s going to die and he knows it. But Jyn doesn’t believe it yet. Jyn doesn’t want him to die. So for her, maybe, he will try to stay alive, even though he can’t see any path to survival. The pain keeps getting worse as the last of the adrenaline drains away.

But she wants him to survive, so he’ll try. He’s trying. This isn’t the first time he’s been sure he was about to die, and he survived every other time. Why not this one? Rebellions are built on hope; that’s what he’d told Jyn. So okay. He can hope. There’s no harm in it.

The first time he almost died, he was six years old. If he is right about his age, that was twenty years ago. That was when the war became real, when it crash landed right in his life. He can’t remember much from before the first time he almost died, except that he had lived in a house and he’d had a mother, and he thinks maybe he’d gone to school. None of those things were true afterward. He wonders how old Jyn was the first time she almost died, and what she remembers from before. She seems to remember more about her parents than he remembers about his. He doesn’t think he would recognize his father like she had recognized hers; in his memory his father doesn’t have a face, only a voice. In his memory, his mother has even less: no face, no voice, only a vague sense that she existed.

Every breath hurts more than the last one. To distract himself, he studies her face, commits it to memory. She’s so beautiful. Why is he only noticing it now, when he’s dying and it’s too late to do anything about it? 

He doesn’t really know her, but he wants to. Maybe if he lives, he’ll have a chance. Maybe if they live, they’ll both have a chance. Maybe he will tell her something, and then she will know something that no one else knows about him. Ordinarily the idea would be, by turns, terrifying or laughable. Now it feels like something to hope for.

When they reach the ground floor, they stagger out. Everything is chaos outside, smoking and scarred. He’s trying not to put too much of his weight on her shoulder, but he can’t seem to support himself at all; every time he puts any weight on his leg his knee collapses. He wonders if it’s broken. It doesn’t hurt like a break hurts, but everything hurts so much that it’s hard to pick any one sensation out. The taste of blood is getting stronger.

When he was nine, he’d gotten pneumonia. Every night for weeks he lay in his little cot, sweating and shivering with fever, struggling to breathe, dreaming terrifying dreams, and forgetting that his parents were both dead, so he cried out for his mamá, who never came. He thought he was going to die. Everyone thought he was going to die. He remembers once hearing two of them discussing whether it wasn’t cruel to drag it out and wait for the disease to kill him, if it wouldn’t be a mercy to shoot him. He’s not entirely sure whether that memory is true or not. In the end, they managed to steal enough antibiotics to save him, and that was another time that he’d lived.

He’s not sure where they’re going. Back to the ship? He can’t remember which pad they landed at, and there is so much smoke and destruction everywhere, he wouldn’t count on the ship still being there, or their pilot. Maybe they’re just trying to find a nice place to lie down and die. He wonders if anyone else is still alive, if any of the people who came down to this planet with them will make it off again. He hopes so.

Then, in the distance, they see it: the end of hope. A light they’ve both seen before; another time he should have died, just a few days ago, and they’d gotten away. They’d gotten away then, but they won’t now. How could they? They have no ship, they have no friends, he can’t even walk. They have nothing except each other, and as much as he would like to believe that's enough, he knows it isn't. She should have gone when she had the chance. She should have left him behind. He should have shot himself just so she would stop trying to save him, when he knew he was unsavable. Now she’s going to die, too.

He feels Jyn sag, so he tries to hold her up like she is holding him, but instead they both fall to the ground. It’s a beach, warm sand, cool water, and it feels nice. It’s pretty, like the kind of place you see in holovids where rich people go on vacation. It’s getting so hard to breathe.

When he was twelve, a stormtrooper shot him in the back. He’d been trying to blow up a bridge, and had gotten caught, so he ran, and took a blaster bolt to the back of his shoulder. He got lucky. It didn’t hit anything vital. He fell into the snow and lay still. He knew he couldn’t run away. He got lucky again: the stormtrooper didn’t bother to shoot him a second time.

He is so tired, and he doesn’t want Jyn to die. He wants Jyn to live. He wants her to leave him here on the beach and go get on a ship and fly away, but he knows she won’t, and it’s too late anyway, because that hideous, beautiful light is getting closer. He doesn’t want her to die, but selfishly, he’s glad that she didn’t leave him after all. He’d rather die with her than die alone. When did she become so important to him? He always thought that he _would_ die alone, because he was always alone; even when he was with other people he’d been alone, because after you see enough of your childhood friends get shot, or blow themselves up, you stop having friends, you stop caring about anyone, because otherwise there would be no way to survive it. You would succumb to despair, and despair is toxic.

That’s the only rule, is not to love anyone, and he must have broken it when he met Jyn. He wishes he’d figured it out sooner. 

“Your father would have been proud of you, Jyn,” he says, just to say something, just to feel her name in his mouth one last time. How would he know what her father would think, he never met the man, but her father is the one who sent them here, so maybe it’s the right thing to say. He wants to make her happy, as happy as she can be while staring death in the face, and he thinks that will make her happy. She loved her father. She wanted to make him proud.

She wraps her arms around him and he holds on to her. It feels good. Right. Everything hurts, except for this. He wishes they had more time. He wishes they had any time. He wishes he had kissed her after all. The air smells strange, like ozone. The last thought he ever thinks is her name.


End file.
